Author, designer, photographer (amateur), I represent lots of middles: mid-continent resident, middle-income, middle-aged ... and try to do so creatively. Currently working on re-designing my life as I ride the cusp of the new millenium.
To read more work by Nancy F. Furner, visit www.quillerworks.net Orren Mixer passed away on April 29, 2008. He was 87. He was an equine artist who was well-known in the Western horse community by the time I moved to the Midwest in 1980. My first exposure to him were the stallion portraits some of his clients used for their ads in the horse-racing magazine where I worked.
His method was to take photographs of the horse he was commissioned to paint and work from those. This gave his work a static quality, I thought. I didn’t care for it much. To be fair, I’m not sure how an artist would go about painting a horse’s portrait without working from photographs. Horse’s minds don’t work the way human minds work. Mr. Mixer was as well-known for his photography as he was for his paintings.
Years later, I went to work for a printing company. One of its biggest accounts at that time was a racetrack. Sandy S___ was the track’s advertising manager. She spent a lot of time at my company working on various projects. One year, the track decided to hold a number of stakes races for Appaloosa horses, so we had to lay out, typeset and print a little condition book for them. Appaloosas aren’t as well-known for racing as Thoroughbreds or even Quarter Horses, so there isn’t much material to work with. The little book was finished and ready to go to press, but it still needed a photo of racing Appaloosas crossing the finish line for the cover. Such a photo did not exist. We had stacks of photographs of racing Quarter Horses lying around the office, so I asked Sandy to pick out one or two in which the horses could not be identified, and I would try to paint Appaloosa blankets on their rumps. She found two or three such photos, I got the bottle of white-out, and went to work. When I finished, all the horses in the frame whose hindquarters were visible displayed the characteristic light-colored spots or “dusting” there. Sandy and my boss agreed that it looked pretty convincing. We shot the halftone and the book went to press.
A short time after that, the track held a gala to inaugurate its first Appaloosa stakes season. Everyone who was anyone in regional horse racing was there. During the party, Orren Mixer approached Sandy and drew her aside.
“Who did you get to paint the spots on those Quarter Horses’ rear ends?” he asked her.
Of all those horsemen who attended that party and received copies of the condition book, equine artist Orren Mixer was the only person who noticed our subterfuge. What eyes that man had!